by BAR columnist michael hureaux perezThe imperial menu offers us a range of dishes, from prime cut mass murder (Congo, Af-Pak), to trailer park cold cuts a la Sarah Palin and her abstinence-preaching daughter-momma. And then there's “Golden Tonsils Obama, whose Cairo speech just two weeks ago fell into that realm the character in Mel Brooks’ movie Blazing Saddles was talking about when he said another character in the film had a 'prettier tongue then a fifty dollar whore.'”
Eshu’s blues: It’s a jungle out here
by BAR columnist michael hureaux perez
“The leaders of both major political parties are bombing and strafing their way around the world and bankrupting the general public.”
Would-be Vice President Sarah Palin usually endorses the sort of zoo that the bourgeois political world has become, but things have been quiet on her end for a few weeks and if she’s going to stay in the running for the Republican nomination in 2012, she’s got to come on like she’s actually about something other than burning Arab children or preventing gay people from getting married here in the good old U.S. of A. The leaders of both major political parties are bombing and strafing their way around the world and bankrupting the general publichere at home with a bailout of speculators and bank thieves, but Sarah Palin’s in a lather about some comment David Letterman made about her daughter. It’s a funny thing - of course, Palin wasn’t very upset about her old running mate Johnny McCain’s joke that “Chelsea Clinton was ugly because she was Janet Reno’s daughter.” But there are priorities when you dearly want to be vice president, or president, or something other than the obvious white right-wing whack hack job you are, so family honor is now a political issue that should concern us all. And it’s a jungle out there.
Oh, vice presidential ambition can be such a burr under the saddle. Vice President Joseph Biden, having actually won power, has many things over which to have a power-mongering tizzy. The vice president of the largest holding interest in the world needs to look like he’s doing something besides counting votes in the Senate. So, what to do? Well, there’s plenty. Mahmoud Ahmedinejad just handily won reelection over in Iran, and from many an account, the West appears to be shocked at the results because apparently votes outside of Teheran count as much as votes in the urban center, and out in the hinterlands, Ahmedinejad had the support Mir Hussein Mousavi didn’t. Apparently the only people who weren’t surprised were people in Iran.
“Perhaps the teeming mass will be swayed by Golden Tonsils Obama.”
Out here in the western world, where many of us who reject grand narrative labor under the delusion that Ahmedinejad should have been defeated because he’s a sexist and homophobic jerk, we might have to reckon with class realities that operate outside of postmodern theory or identity politics as an end in itself. But that’s not going to happen for awhile. In the meantime, there will be many of us who crusade merrily behind Vice President Biden as he supports Mousavi’s call to cancel the election. What a guy! I’m sure pseudo-democratic moralisms from the vice president of a superpower which ices hundreds of thousands of people in the Middle East, and forces hundreds of thousands more into refugee status, will carry some real weight. And if such bromides don’t sway the folks of the Middle East, perhaps the teeming mass will be swayed by Golden Tonsils Obama, whose Cairo speech just two weeks ago fell into that realm the character in Mel Brooks’ movie Blazing Saddles was talking about when he said another character in the film had a “prettier tongue then a fifty dollar whore.” Maybe. But it’s a jungle out there.
If all else fails, the hijinx of the North Korean stalinoid Kim Jong II, who has been testing nuclear weapons at a rate that the imperialists of the West find quite alarming, ought to get people panting. God forbid any government in the non-white world find a way to defend itself from a clear aggressor like the United States, and by god, Vice President Joe Biden promised us that the Obama administration would find itself tested in a serious way in its first six months. Joe wants us to know this might be the test. But why this Kim Jong the Second is such a pain is a mystery. Why North Korea would feel threatened by the West is beyond anybody’s guess, apparently, leaving out the war the United States conducted against the country fifty years ago which cost a couple million lives, or the permanent stationing of thirty thousand troops all these decades since. Some people are just too touchy.
Yes, it’s a jungle out there, and Tarzan just really doesn’t know what to do. Tarzan has tried not to bundolo (word for “kill” in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s ape-man novels) but some people just have to be bundolo’d. Especially those restless natives, who, in the absence of a revolutionary working class movement, have a nasty habit of supporting anybody who will say anything even remotely critical of the empire. If that means supporting the Kim Jong IIs and the Mahmoud Ahmenidejads, so it goes. And it can go no other way, so long as the world needs a revolutionary, democratic socialism, and the merchant’s empire insists on doing everything its own way, and works actively to suppress any secular resistance with a cutting edge.
“God forbid any government in the non-white world find a way to defend itself from a clear aggressor like the United States.”
Politics abhors a vacuum. So long as postmodern political culture insists on an alleged neutral quality found in the apocalyptic vomit of the world ruling class dictatorship, the main beneficiaries of the resistance will always be led by the loudest emotional shouters, in this instance, Kim Jong II and Mahmoud Ahmenidejad. Thus have the ruling class and all its followers made the world.
None of this would surprise Franz Fanon, dead nearly half a century now, but still more alive than many of the critics of his marxist methodology:
“The leader pacifies the people. For years on end after independence has been won, we see him, incapable of urging on the people to a concrete task, unable really to open the future to them or of flinging them into the path of national reconstruction, that is to say, of their own reconstruction; we see him reassessing the history of independence and recalling the sacred unity of the struggle for liberation. The leader, because he refuses to break up the national bourgeoisie, asks the people to fall back into the past and to become drunk on the remembrance of the epoch which led to independence. The leader, seen objectively, brings the people to a halt, and persists in either expelling them from history or preventing them from taking root in it…(pg 169, Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Grove Press Edition, 1963).
Yes, indeed. The leader, objectively speaking, brings the people to a halt, and persists in either expelling them from history or preventing them from taking root in it. The tale is told of you and me. Screw Palin, the same for Biden, and Obama, and the mediocre clown Letterman, who only the disaffected believers in professional class foppery find amusing, and Ahmenidejad, and Kim Jong II. The whole story is told of you and me, the collective memory of the working class. And, for the time being, at least, it’s a jungle out here.
BAR columnist michael hureaux perez is a writer, musician and teacher who lives in southwest Seattle, Washington. He is a longtime contributor to small and alternative presses around the country and performs his work frequently. Email to: tricksterbirdboy@yahoo.com
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